NBC promoted its coverage of the summer Olympics in Athens as a grand experiment. For the first time it would put all 28 Olympic sports out there for the U.S. television audience that claimed to want them all. The message, in effect, was “If you air it they will come,” though “Put up or shut up” was implied as well. Using its cable siblings in addition to its broadcast network affiliates, NBC squeezed 1,210 hours of coverage on seven channels into the 17 days from opening ceremony to closing ceremony. Yet I don’t believe even NBC was prepared for how revolutionary its coverage turned out to be. Yes, many of the same old faults persisted, foremost among them the airing of marquee events on tape for the wider prime-time audience, with many sliced and diced to build maximum drama. (As with figure skating in the winter games, the major gymnastics competitions typically didn’t conclude until NBC was about to sign off, which was at 11 PM locally.) But complaints against this entrenched practice deserve to be filed under the Robinson Jeffers heading “Be angry at the sun for setting if these things anger you.”
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For years the major TV networks have been in the business of creating stars and heroes to promote the sports they’ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars buying the rights to broadcast. NBC and ABC have been quite open about using Larry Bird and Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan and, now, Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant and Tim Duncan to market the National Basketball Association. The other networks have followed suit in other sports: Fox championing the Mark McGwire-Sammy Sosa home run chase in 1998, all the networks pushing the Green Bay Packers’ Brett Favre as the face and soul of the National Football League. The burgeoning BALCO scandal cut the legs out from under U.S. track and field before the Athens games, so the American athlete who was hyped as the emblem of the games came to be 19-year-old swimmer Michael Phelps. His attempt to top Mark Spitz’s seven gold medals won in Munich in 1972 quickly failed when he had to settle for bronze in two of the first three events he swam in. But when the hype was stripped away a tremendous athlete and sportsman was revealed. First, Phelps made no apology about finishing third to Australia’s Ian Thorpe and defending gold medalist Pieter van den Hoogenband of the Netherlands in the 200-meter freestyle, saying he’d simply wanted to swim against the best. (Thorpe, by contrast, declined to compete in Phelps’s best events.) Then Phelps just plain won everything else in sight. With his fearsome dark goggles and lantern jaw popping up again and again in the butterfly, he looked like the fierce figurehead on a Viking ship surging across the water. Yet he ceded his spot on the last relay to Ian Crocker, a swimmer with something to prove after his abysmal opening leg on the first major relay relegated Phelps to his first bronze. With Phelps leading the cheering section, Crocker helped the U.S. team post a world record. And Phelps, who got credit for that final relay win by swimming one of the qualifying heats, came home with six golds.
For me, diving became the sport that epitomized the Athens Olympics. Not a single U.S. diver earned a medal in these games, so there was no national rooting interest. I don’t recall seeing a single profile of any of the divers, not even Wang Feng, the Chinese favorite with the Gil Thorp haircut and washboard abs, until a piece on Canada’s Alexandre Despatie turned up during the last night of competition. Yet I could never turn away. Man or woman, platform or springboard, athlete followed athlete in a flow of beautiful bodies in beautiful motion–the essence of sport, it seems to me–as the perceptive NBC analyst Cynthia Potter carefully dissected the pros and cons of each in that charming, honey-lemon southern accent of hers. Not coincidentally, diving was also where NBC’s technical coverage excelled. Stop-motion multiple-exposure images enhanced Potter’s analysis–sometimes comparing divers by superimposing one dive on another–and a plumb-bob camera followed the divers from the platform down under the water.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/AP–Mark Humphrey, Diether Endlicher.
